Critical & Historical Essays eBook

and chromatic pitch will scarcely be worth while, and
I will therefore merely add that the instruments were
sometimes tuned differently, either to relieve the
inevitable monotony of this purely diatonic scale
or for purposes of modulation. A Dorian tetrachord
is composed of semitone, tone, tone; to make it chromatic,
it was changed as follows: [G: e’ f’
g-’ a’] the lichanos, or index
finger string, being lowered a semitone.

The enharmonic pitch consisted of tuning the lichanos
down still further, almost a quarter-tone below the
second string, or parhypate, thus making the
tetrachord run quarter-tone, quarter-tone, two tones.
Besides this, even in the diatonic, the Greeks used
what they called soft intervals; for example, when
the tetrachord, instead of proceeding by semitone,
tone, tone (which system was called the hard diatonic),
was tuned to semitone, three-quarter-tone, and tone
and a quarter. The chromatic pitch also had several
forms, necessitating the use of small fractional tones
as well as semitones.

Our knowledge of the musical notation of the Greeks
rests entirely on the authority of Alypius, and dates
from about the fourth century A.D. That we could
not be absolutely sure of the readings of ancient
Greek melodies, even if we possessed any, is evident
from the fact that these note characters, which at
first were derived from the signs of the zodiac, and
later from the letters of the alphabet, indicate only
the relative pitch of the sounds; the rhythm is left
entirely to the metrical value of the words in the
lines to be sung. Two sets of signs were used
for musical notation, the vocal system consisting
of writing the letters of the alphabet in different
positions, upside down, sideways, etc.

Of the instrumental system but little is known, and
that not trustworthy.

[05] The fundamental doctrine of the Pythagorean philosophy
was that the essence
of all things rests upon musical
relations, that numbers
are the principle of all that
exists, and that the
world subsists by the rhythmical
order of its elements.
The doctrine of the “Harmony of
the spheres” was
based on the idea that the celestial
spheres were separated
from each other by intervals
corresponding with the
relative length of strings
arranged so as to produce
harmonious tones.